Defending “The Space”
Discussion
As I watch “Jesus Camp”, “Expelled”, and “The God Who Wasn’t There” (see contextual note at the bottom of this article if you haven’t seen them, and for my impressions as a context of this article), I see a certain lack of acknowledging self-bias, or at least a respecting the opposing viewpoint and giving them more than a straw-man representation. These three films are incindiary – the viewer will see things that will probably upset them, whether or not they are for/against the viewpoint advocated by the film. Opponents of each of these films’ viewpoints will feel misrepresented, and proponents of the films’ viewpoint will feel vindicated, but perhaps with a lingering sensation that the other side was presented unfairly.
I see these three films as prime examples of people expressing their perceptions of the ‘other’ – the group that they oppose, feel persecuted by, or are otherwise fearful of their overwhelming power in some institution of society (e.g., religion, academia, politics).
In “Expelled” and “The God Who Wasn’t There” which prop up pet theories by examining some isolated bits of historical/scientific evidence, I see an extraordinary lack of self-scrutiny. Both prop up their viewpoints by interviewing and interjecting quotes from experts in appropriate fields that are biased toward their side, and then compare these answers to those of laymen representing the opposition. Neither seriously grills their experts. Both think of good follow-up questions for the opposition interviewees that scrutinize the last answer to a question, but instead of asking the interviewee this question, they snidely ask it in a voice-over in the film, giving no chance for rebuttal or an answer to the question by the interviewee.
“Jesus Camp” is only slightly better – it does not provide direct editorialization other than by showing some footage of a radio show host who opines about how the evangelicals are a scary conservative social movement that wants to turn everyone to their side, that will not be tolerant of a liberal minority when the conservatives are in political power. Other than this commentary, the majority of the film is spent observing prayer meetings / sermons or interviews of the children they follow. The editing style gives a sense of casual observation – just poking a camera into this microcosm of evangelical children and seeing what these kids experience. Fairly neutral.
These three films all portrayed a group of people that opposes the film’s viewpoint, and all are unfairly biased – and I qualify biased with unfairly for this reason: While everyone may express personal bias, I believe it damages the trust (“the space”) between two opposing sides when we try and caricature the other side without asking that side how they feel about that caricature. I do believe that caricatures are a necessary evil since discussion requires brevity of expression to communicate big ideas. So it is important that we ask the ‘other’, is it ok – is it sufficiciently accurate – for me to summarize you as being this way? None of these films do this. They caricature without backtracking to ask the people they interview, “Is it okay if I edit the interview down to these snippets? Is there something I can do to better represent your view in a reasonable amount of time?”
Many of the controversial discussions I happen across on the internet or in person seem to end up getting sidetracked by the issue of one (or both sides) having to correct the opposing party’s view of themselves. The “angry atheist”, or the “bible-thumping christian” are not fair characterizations for a lot of people, and it really just ends up wasting time when we keep reinforcing modes of thought that stem from a couple mental biases:
1. Ingroup/Outgroup Biases: We like to to think of the ingroup as rational, logical, reasonable, civilized, compassionate; we like to think of the outgroup/other as emotional, irrational, unreasonable, uncivilized, mean-spirited.
2. Confirmation Bias: we search out evidence that confirms our own position, and don’t spend much time looking for support of opposing viewpoints or evidence that contradicts our theories of interpretation.
Often enough, these biases misguide us into a supposition about our evidence/theory, or about the motivations of the other as less than noble. This damages “the space” – the trust that needs to be firmly established between opposing groups before meaningful discussion and mutual understanding can begin to take place. I’m disappointed when I see such damaging conversation take place in so much of the media (internet, TV, newspapers, editorials, etc.) I can find about issues important to me – religion, civil rights, politics, science. I’d like the discussion to rise to the level of making progress, instead of just being inflammatory.
I want discussions to take the next step: for people to think of their favorite group to hate on an ideological, poltical, or religious issue – think about the possiblity that they might have some noble motive, some good reason for feeling the way that they do. Truly believe that the opponent has a legitimate set of human feelings and reasons for thinking what they do – that perhaps, if in their shoes, you would maybe have the same feelings too. Think about why the argument is taking place, rather than the exact logic of an opponent’s argument. Ask why you both care about the issue at hand. Are these noble endeavors and emotions? This, I hope, is the context of good discussion.
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Contextual Note – here is a summary of each movie, and my impression of what view I think the film/film-maker(s) were advocating, so you have an idea of what stuck out for me in these films:
“Jesus Camp” is a documentary that follows around a few kids that go to an evangelical bible camp in the summer and some related church rallies/activities.
My impression: The film-makers view the evangelicals depicted in the film as a political/social threat to religious freedom in the U.S.. The film features numerous clips of the christians making fairly totalitarian statements about controlling the law of the land by using their voting block to sway elections and their children to sway peoples’ hearts. It also seemed like the film-makers wanted the viewer to see the evangelicals as a bit extreme, and with silly spiritual rituals or beliefs – there were many clips of speaking-in-tongues, singing, laying on of hands, etc.
“The God Who Wasn’t There” is a documentary/commentary film by an atheist that discusses some history related to the timing of the writing of various parts of the Bible, interpretation of the Bible, and his personal education in a private christian elementary school.
My impression: The atheist is antagonistic towards fundamentalist christians and thinks their beliefs are untenable by the standard of historical evidence, thinks moderate christians should be fundamentalists (they’re liberal ideas about interpretation are just silly), and feels the school he attended was wrong in indoctrinating / forcing the children to believe in christianity if the principal admits to the possiblity of being wrong about his choice of the ‘correct’ religion.
“Expelled” tries to make the case that the ‘Intelligent Design’ movement is being unfairly kept out of school curricula because of a sheer bias by the academic community towards naturalism / evolutionary / darwinist thought.
My impression: The film-makers viewed “Big Science” as an academic establishment based upon atheistic/anti-religious values that is bent on supporting evolution being taught in schools regardless of scientific evidence that supports or is contrarian to this theory. This view is supported by interviews with various scholars who prop up the idea that the ID movement is a generally persecuted by “Big Science” for bad reasons – e.g., scientists are too narrow-minded with their set-in-stone ideologies to allow for other possible theories to even be evaluated by the scientific establishment. The film also strongly implied that science leads to a society with a moral vacuum, whereas religion brings people to God and helps them to play nice with each other.
I disagree with you on this… to say that “Jesus Camp” is the only slightly better than “Expelled”…
Not every documentary that attempts to show their own side is dishonest. Not every edit of an interview is inherently mendacious. Not every person who has reached a conclusion and seeks to convince others is the enemy of objectivity. If you’re writing a paper about Nixon, it’s not necessary to quote six paragraphs ahead and six paragraphs below to establish “they (the Mexicans) don’t live like a bunch of dogs which the Negroes do live like” as a racist statement. It’s completely fair to bring that up as point against Nixon.
“Expelled” was dishonest in it’s METHODOLOGY, which “Jesus Camp” wasn’t (Which is why “Expelled” sent me into such a rage). They made several completely erroneous statement — hell, more than erroneous, they were outright lies — because there’s is simply no way that they could have simply overlooked so many fundamental facts so frequently, and only in self-serving ways. “Jesus Camp” depicting moments that seem bizarre to an outside observer isn’t a form of rhetorical treachery devised to deceive the viewer. If you had been one of the film’s makers, those moments would stick out in your mind. If someone had asked you “what was it like?”, you probably would have included some of those incidents as part of the story. A small child weeping uncontrollably while confessing his “sin” of doubt IS something that deserves to be part of the story.
A quick rhetorical question: which of these is a more honest reply to “How was your day?”:
1) The day was awful. I woke up an hour late, missed the bus, had to call cab to get to work, had the asshole boss yell at me for missing my meeting with our client. I scraped through the rest of the day okay, but I felt like crap the whole time.
2) Arrived at work at 08:50, informed that of late arrival had caused me to miss meeting w/ client, worked on Jenkins account until 12:40. Went to lunch at 13:05 and came back at 13:35. Work on Sandez account til 16:00 at which point I went home.
The first is obviously a more biased account. It has more emotion, less information, and more interpretation. And yet the second is, paradoxically, less honest. It presents an inaccurately mundane picture of the day, whitewashes the altercation with the boss, and completely hides the fact that he felt his work was impaired. It has more information, yes, but the extraneous data isn’t salient, and merely distracts from
the question. Interpretation isn’t the enemy of objectivity — dishonesty is. And “Expelled” is very, very dishonest, while the only quibble I had with “Jesus Camp” was the ubiquitous cuts to the radio host to provide exegesis. She shouldn’t use talking heads to express your views unless you feel they made a particular good idea you want to give them credit for. If you feel the point is implicit, it doesn’t need a voice, and if the point needs to be made explicit, take responsibility for the message of the film and have the narrator make it.
Noticing a cognitive biases is a double-edged sword. There is always the danger of OVER-correcting – of realizing that we tend to see the world in all black and white and end up calling the zebra gray. In in-grouping and out-grouping, that danger is made manifest when people start to humanize that which is morally repugnant, or begin to equivocate fact to appease a sense of fairness. The Khmer Rouge wasn’t bad because of my cultural biases, but because the ideas and people behind it were fundamentally foolish and evil. The people who believed that the world was flat were wrong. People who argue that thetans cause disease are mistaken. People who argue that I shouldn’t act so sure damn well better be willing to argue that the world is flat, or that Cambodian genocide was for the best, or that disease comes from from a volcano. To say “you only THINK you’re right” is the basest aspersion on a belief. If I shouldn’t think I’m right, convince me I’m wrong — tell me WHY. Don’t try to convince me that there is no truth, unless you honestly believe there is no truth, or no objective reality.
What I object to in “Expelled” is the lying, and blatant demagoguery of the film. I am a democrat, but feel interested when I read William F. Buckley and George Will. If I read Sean Hannity, or for that matter, Andrea Dworkin, I have a disgusting feeling that there arguments are not made to be useful to people, but merely to use people. I’ve read a lot of christian apologists without being offended by them. I am not enraged by “Expelled”’s ideology, but its methodology. To the filmmakers, lying is okay — it’s just Pious Fraud. And that’s what “Expelled” was all about.
I think I get what you’re point is – there’s a difference between the methodology of “Expelled” vs. “Jesus Camp”, most definitely – Expelled did use polemics that were dishonest, and they had to know they were doing something dishonest when they made the film. Jesus Camp was innocuous and neutral compared – they really just showed what they saw as outsiders visiting a group of people who do things very differently from the “general” population. Your reaction to this amuses me, I have to say :) You always get upset when you think the idea that truth isn’t objective is advanced.
Here’s my response to yours:
1. I’m not addressing the objectivity of truth. My views (and yours) on that are irrelevant to the discussion, since the discussion isn’t about it. What it *is* about is addressing the _process_ by which people try to understand each other, and how they perceive the “other”-ness. I’m also talking about how people choose to share information with their in-group about their personal perceptions of outgroups.
2. I re-read the article, and I think I can summarize it down to a shorter point: It bothers me that when we observe others, we don’t ask those others we observe if they agree with our short-hand descriptions of them, and pass that information along with the observation itself.
I’m saying it would be more interesting to hear both that someone said, “Niggers live like dogs.”, and when asked if they were racist or if they thought it was possibly an offensive comment, they replied “No.”, than to hear just the observation itself – them saying “Niggers live like dogs.”. This links back to why I think Jesus Camp, though neutral in its format, is still self-serving and biased. If they cut the film, then showed it to the people in the film, and included an “extras” DVD feature of the people portrayed in the film talking about how they felt about their portrayal in the film, I think it would be much more revealing than the film itself. I think the fact that, after this film was released, the camp disbanded, then moved and re-named itself, says something about how they felt about their own portrayal in the film. I’m not sympathizing with them as “victims” of portrayal, I’m just observing that the extra information – knowing what their reaction is to their own portrayal in a film – is more revealing than the film itself. I can’t help but wonder why we don’t include that as an extra “featurette” part documentaries that’s optional to see, but nonetheless part of the package. Then the documentary is more a discussion between people than a one-sided viewpoint that can’t be rebutted by the party being observed.
3. Something else I thought of – as a general social example, consider that we have a lot of data on what people look like (pictures), but also what they think about how they look (surveys). If you were to show someone an array of pictures spanning from ugly to attractive in even steps (in some “scientific”/”objective” fashion), and then told them that 70% of them considered themselves attractive (“above average”), this reveals something more than the fact that we have a variety of attractiveness – it also tells us that people think highly of themselves even if, in the objective comparison sense, they don’t have a reason to. Knowing what people look like, but also what they think of how they look, tells us much more about people than just the first part.
My overall point: I’m just concerned that we don’g get an important part of the puzzle when forming opinions about others – their perception of how we view them. This can shape *so* much of how opposing groups interact with each other. I also think it’s much more damaging to view people as inhuman, or that they aren’t introspective. So many are introspective, or at least reactive to their reflection in the biased-mirror (the other person’s viewpoint), and yet we don’t consider that part of a person very important when trying to understand them.
Is there something about this concern that you disagree with?
I do get riled — because people who are arguing that there is no external reality are themselves making a statement about external reality. It’s not only most often argued insincerely, it is most often argued hypocritically. It ultimately provides a blank check for moral relativism, intellectual laziness, and crazy beliefs. I know that’s tangential, and you are not one of the people I’m railing against there. I’m just explaining why the idea gets under my skin.
1) But when you discuss biases the issue of objectivity is almost always relevant, as it is here. The whole premise of your blog post related to the way fact is reported, and how we misconstrue and characterize others in a group of our peers. This comes directly into play when you are forced to make the decision of which comments are important to include in a documentary. It is perfectly acceptable to show pieces of information that portray a action or group as doing something wrong, if you truly believe that they are having a pernicious effect on society, and present honestly what led you to your decision, I see nothing wrong with this.
2) While that information may be interesting, and may be a good idea for documentary makers in the future, it is not a necessity for honesty or completeness. Ted Haggard using crystal meth with a male hooker while preaching that homosexuality is an abomination is the story — not his later mishmash of denials and admissions. And the film IS effective on the in-group. My brother, a Christian himself, was deeply disturbed by the movie, and I know many others are as well. When I see a fair vilification of an atheist — for example, someone who is actively cruel and mocking toward believers, who uses spaghetti logic to support a smug sense of superiority (I’m looking at you, Bill Maher). I have a desire to distance myself from them, to realize that this IS a problem, and I should try to avoid it. If I see someone beat their child unconscious in a supermarket for knocking over a display, I don’t feel how they would defend their actions is relevant — nothing they could say could change their original action. It might be interesting to see how they justify such a heinous act, but it is not unfairly biased to write an account of only of the incident when discussing bad parenting. It is, however, a very serious problem if I made the story up and reported it as fact (which is what “Expelled” did.)
3.) It’s called the fundamental attribution error. But it is also a mistake to think that all of the results of the above test is due to that. A man who thinks mullets look good will try to give himself a mullet. A woman who thinks that big hair is sexy will try to have a beehive. And the familiarity of features will prevent an abnormality from jumping out at you. And there is strong evidence to suggest people are attracted to people who share features of their own face — not out of narcissism, but simply out of acclimatization. Sorry, tangential, I know.
I understand the concern, but I feel that it isn’t true when dealing with “Jesus Camp”. It would be wrong to imply that the film was unfairly biased because it didn’t allow the pastor to reply to the film as a whole. The film was trying to show that lines that shouldn’t have been crossed were crossed. It does a very good job of this, and it shouldn’t be considered skewed or unfair. If someone gets convicted of a crime, the prosecution shouldn’t be considered unfair for not including how they rationalized the crime to themselves. The intent of the trial, as was the intent of the movie, is to show that a wrong was being committed, and how the wrong is affecting public discourse. And While I have no problems with understanding in the literal sense, too often a certain subset of liberals mean by it “focus on motivation, events that evoke pity, and equivocations until you stop feeling that the person was wrong in doing something wrong.” The wrong should also be part of the understanding.
And finally, although this is slightly tangential, sometimes people DO simply lack introspection. The pastor herself is a good example of this: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2501819&page=1 . Look at her remarks, for example, about Disney promoting witchcraft on page three.